Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Red Hat Linux 7.1 was my very first taste of Linux, and I think it was a pretty good start. Many things worked right away and the installation had just the kind of graphical niceness, tree menus for package selections and instructive texts that a beginner like me wants. The closest thing to a problem I remember having was my slight fear of messing with my partitions. I don't remember if I fixed that using some other program or not, but anyway everything got up and running without a hitch.
Then came the fun of learning everything about where everything was, how to use it and so on :-) ...
Even if everything went well with the partitions I think they've actually been the greatest headache nevertheless. The simple reason is that the original setup was a bit too cramped, the result of a well used and highly partitioned hard drive. Remedies for that consisted of additional partitions taking on different parts of the file system, and I ended up with a partition table that looked cool and advanced but wasn't as spacey or flexible as I wanted.
So, creating that setup caused some problems, but getting rid of it caused even more headaches. What I tried to do was move everything over and somehow get it all recognized on one nice and big partition on my new hard drive without having to reinstall things. Of course, the result was a nice big failure (I did manage to get back to a working setup though), and a quick reinstall made everything work nicely again.
I have had some other problems as well. Some strangeness with things locking up before I restart X once and failure to get the resolution and refresh rate I'm used to from Windows has detracted a bit from the fun. Also, having the Linux on the same computer as a Windows install with lots of stuff you use all the time isn't any good for the Linux usage. You just never get around to booting it. Therefore, Mandrake on Pigbox has seen and still seees a lot more action than Red Hat ever does, despite my Red Hat installation being almost a year older.
Addition on July 6th 2002
With time to spare and nobody occupying Terminus I booted into Red Hat again for a change, mostly to refresh my mind on how it was setup in preparation for possibly installing another OS. One of the greatest things about running Ximian/Gnome is definitely the Red Carpet update software. Everything you need in the way of updates one click away, including support packages and complete installation. So nice! I'm logged in as root right now, and I think there's some kind of problem using X as me right now, but maybe I should get around to fixing that some day ... The more Linux the better I always say :-) ...
On the other hand, 15 Gb is a lot of space given to an OS I use so seldom, maybe I could shrink that a bit after all ... Let's see if there's some kind of nice tool installed that could do that ...